I can't wait to try those magnificient tips tonigt... I should have read this way before trying anything else (Yes, I'm that kind of guy...). I'm new to those "X" and Nvidia problems were not what I'm use to but I keep faith that learning news stuff always pay off
it looks clear to me this will solve my issue so far, and I'll keep you posted with feedbacks that would help others once done.

Thanks for this great and clear toturial!!

(Next step for me, sharing files between My new Mint (Maya) and the GF's laptop Win8.1... pleasant nights to come!!)

*Edit: The "nomodeset xforcevvesa" worked, I updated the driver with the one the update manager suggested me, reboot and now I'm stuck in ttf1 mode... I'll keep reading 'till I find a solution!

*Re-edit: For Nvidia GT 240, this worked for me:

Getting driver 304.xx through the ttf1 screen (where I'm stuck anyway) and be happy to see a beautyful screen working uder my GT 240:

stelil wrote:Just in case this helps someone from spending the hours I did looking around.. I have the issue where the Mint 14 live CD worked, install went OK but then on booting to HDD there was no grub menu and just a black screen and blinking cursor. Convinced it would be a graphics card thing I played around with editing grub with replacement to "no splash" but no joy.

Then I found an old post about mint 11 (I am trying to install mint 14) and xenopeek suggested boot-repair.

I just accepted the defaults when running the utility, it seemed to know exactly where my HDD was and fixed the grub on that /dev/sda.

I'm so happy

Thanks to whomever posted this. I did a clean install into my Dell Inspiron 1501, due to the XP shutdown decided to Linux Mint, as I can't afford a new laptop. The LiveDVD worked great, I installed it on to the harddrive, but then on reboot nothing but a black screen. After reading this, and inputing the "sudo" instructions above into the terminal mode, it ran, cleared up the boot problems and instructed me to reboot. I did and BOOM! I had Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon working like a champ.

I had that problem with 14, but since 16(Mate) I have no video problems. My laptop is Gateway NE71B. Does the AMD drivers had to do with keyboard problem?. Sometimes the keyboard do not boot and have to re-boot to get the keyboard working. No problem in win7 and Fedora(removed).

I had no problems with booting before I changed settings to get a second monitor working on my laptop Dell D820. After a reboot, the booting stops always at checking battery state. I tried to get through with nomodeset... in grub but it changed nothing, what can I do?
Otto

I have had no problems using and working with Olivia 15. When I tried to upgrade to Petra it would not boot. So I followed the above solution and managed to install the system using compatibility mode. It booted into desktop but the system froze. I could not click on anything. There was not pop up menu. After few minutes I got a black screen with some code. I rebooted and amended GRUB as instructed but this did not work. So I am going to install Mint 14 hoping this issue would be solved by the end of April when the support will run out.

I cannot access the grub boot menu. First off let me say I have read through all the articles and thanks to all who have posted. Am using a Compaq Presario sr1115cl, AMD Athlon 2800 processor and switching from windows XP to Linux 13 maya mint 32 bit. Believe I have burnt the OS and downloaded successfully. The integrity check and the MD5 check said all is good. Only thing I questioned when downloading was, a window opened and said "Tmp. ihy2b pl124 folder could not be displayed do not have permission", hit OK and continued the download. From dvd I can open menu and go to places, systems, favorites and applications and open all files and programs with no problem. When I try to boot I get the black screen with blinking cursor. I cannot get to a grub boot page.

Read your article and rebooted from dvd using the "start in compatibility mode" command. I get the Linux screen with the link to "download" and the menu button in bottom left corner. Then Tell computer to restart, The dvd drawer is opened and I remove dvd, shut and hit enter as prompted. Computer reboots to the black screen with blinking cursor. Tried holding down the left shift key while booting and get same results. Tried to boot with DVD in and hold down shift key still no grub page.

I had the same problem, and solved it quite easily.
On boot up count down, hit enter and choose compatibility mode. When Linux mint screen appears, double click install. When install is complete, restart. On restart hold shift key. Grub menu should appear. I had to do restart twice to get it to appear in Mint 17. Pick second entry in grub. Click okay to each screen and Mint will start. Open device drivers and install recommended video driver. Restart and it should start with no problem. It's worked for me for mint 15, 16, and 17.

For what it's worth on an older Sony Vaio VGC V2M All In One PC with Nvidia GoForce5700 with Intel Pentium 4M and using Maya I ended up doing the following. [Edit/Note: see end of post for Qiana which I just installed]
Purging all the drivers, going to the Nvidia site and downloading from there and installing them. At this point the screen either still comes up all wrong or X fails to start.
Next I added to the standard boot nomodeset xforcevesa option as described in the tutorial during the initial boot (press shift, e, then edit the line).
Then I added this permanently using grub and now the Vaio boots into its native resolution and the Nvidia X Server settings are also working fine so it looks like that solved everything.

I expect using the "Additional Drivers" from the Mint menu rather than going to Nvidia would also work but I'm not messing with it.
My final grub boot line for the VGC V2 series
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset xforcevesa"

As these machines came with Windows XP Home I can confirm that everything works fine on Mint 13 Maya which I selected because the PC has only 512MB. If someone is struggling with the wireless keyboard don't forget to press connect on the bottom of the keyboard and on the PC right hand side just under the USB ports and firewire jack. There are no special drivers needed for that or the mouse.

NEW PART REGARDING QIANA:
I decided to install Qiana on the Sony V2M/VGC and could run it no problem from USB in compatibility mode. It then installed cleanly, but when booting the screen colours were all wrong just as in case of Maya. However, trying to fix this by using nomodeset and xforcevesa caused an endless fail loop for the xserver. The problem is in the nouveau drivers and I initially wasted a lot of time blacklisting etc. What I finally ended up doing:
The screen was partially working so I installed the Nvidia 173 driver from inside Qiana. At this point and rebooting things still didn't work right. So I then ran the full update on Qiana after which I rebooted again and now the video works perfectly. So the conclusion is to update all the software first, and then update the screen.
What bugs me however is that I could not force Qiana to boot into Vesa or VGA compatibility after installing Qiana on the PC, instead I needed to do the setup semi-blind.
The good news is that standby works reliably now and in mint it would be a bit unpredictable. Hope this helps others with older Nvidia cards get Qiana up and running.

Hi, I'm having issues booting with my nvidia geforce fx5700LE. I've tried the solutions mentioned in Post 1 but I still keep getting a message during boot that tells me that the display has been restarted 06 (or something) times and blah... blah... blah...

This will take a few moments to run, then SHUT DOWN, re-install the NVIDIA card, plug the monitor back into it, and re-boot.

This error happened to me when I installed a the video card mentioned above to replace the malfunctioning video card linux mint 17 xfce was installed to. After installing all went fine. Then I reinstalled Linux Mint 17 xfce to erase the whole drive (There was still a partition of another Linux distro there) in compatibility mode. After that still all wend fine... Then I tried the "driver manager" and picked the driver with the mark "recommended". After that my problem starts...

I noticed that for many users, there is a different Grub option/argument that works. Unfortunately, I found no place where all these options are given and explained. It would be great if there was one big tutorial and a link to it in the Release notes or somewhere easy to find.

This worked great! I have spent many hours and opened my own topic here as I didn't realise the problem was graphics card related - mainly due to the fact that all of my earlier distros have installed no problems including mint 13, 15 & 16 cinnamon, mate, KDE - all with no problems.

First of ALL: THANK YOU FOR YOUR PRETTY xx-Versions from LINUX MINT ! ! !
I will donate, whenever i can, looking for XFCE...thx !!!

But nowadays i am sad: Linux Mint 17 seemed to me as a step to -STONE AGE-
I prefered Xfce ESPECIALLY for older PCs/Laptops. Nowadays i must do some special tricks to get my OLDER computers running. May i really use software from 2012 or 2013. Are you crazy?

Yes, because of fatigue I had forgotten all can be fixed in grub using the "e" edit button, I've managed to boot up, have a cursor by doing nomodeset 1280x1024x24 then I was able to get a login screen (prompt) when typing in ctrl+alt+f2 and install my amd drivers (multiple video cards in crossfire). Should have read before posting, sorry. This really works btw, I thought nomodeset would work as it was said it would show a command prompt login right away but that didn't happen here, I had to do the specific Qiana edit.

I'm so glad not to have to reinstall, this made my day (and night), I can go to bed satisfied now, especially since I fixed another problem today (unrelated to LM17, but I couldn't get my motherboard to make my Corsair Vengeance 1866mhz memory work at 1866mhz, now I experience such power, it would get locked at 900mhz, now LM17 feels like it should, really fast).

In regards to: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 78#p953355
Isn't it possible to include other drivers before by extracting the ISO file, adding / altering files with (newer) drivers and then making an ISO file again?
If this is a possibility, I'd gladly like to know how to do so.

For my issues... It's VERY weird. I have an Asus ROG-G20 desktop with Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 and an Intel HD 4600 graphics card. I have enabled "other OS" in Bios and disabled "secure boot." When I try to live cd or usb boot Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, the grub will pop up. I tried boot normal, boot compatibility, tried the "nomodeset" boot parameter and the nouveau.modeset=0 and the xforcevesa. None of them work. After the grub screen I get only a black screen I tried everything. When I try live boot from USB which uses the UEFI (FAT), and I put in the "nomodeset" I still have a black screen, but I hear the cinnamon login sound, but no picture. That's the closet I got. Please, please help. Thanks. Oh, and I'm trying to dual boot with Windows 8.1 sadly, which I know how to do.